Marketing, has finally come into the industry. Marketing gives personality and differentiates for advantage. Marketing creates relationships with customers that go deeper than anything you sell or make. And of course, social marketing, yet to be mastered by most, facilitates those relationships and drives word of mouth.

My argument, supported by NYT and WSJ clips I showed in the primer I wrote and released in 1999is that the dotCOM bust wouldn’t have happened had Venture Capitalists discovered marketing first rather than an after thought.

2012 is the year that marketing rules to make one stand-out in a me-too online world.

Groupon’s, for example, $12 billion value is all about the brand they built- not the $1billion by comparison technology buy of You Tube by Google that still lacks a central idea from a business or revenue point of view. The difference is between what is cool and what is the bottom line. And launching a business around a central idea while most websites are built on a certain sense of sameness.

Here are the highlights of my 10-Step Recipe for 21st Century Marketing Success.

==>People don’t buy brands. They join brands.Interactive marketing is about brand relevance and consumer involvement. So your challenge is to create a sense of identity or belonging. And fulfilling people’s expectations of what they will get in exchange for allowing you into their lives.

==>What’s currently relevant is constantly changing.Fortunately, the Web offers the unique ability to reach and bring together like-minded customers from all over the world.

==>You can market to one life or all.Any one prospect can be multiple customers: Business services decision-maker, luxury products consumer, grandparent, community leader. Green. Black. Gay.

==>You can change to be what your customers need.On the Web, you have the unprecedented opportunity to put on a different face to different communities or market segments.

==>Connecting people to each other connects them to you.On the Web, people search out and share marketing messages they fast forward through on TV. Combining traditional media with the power of the Web, you can turn transactions into relationships and transform your brand into something that people want to be a part of for the rest of their lives – and one generation to the next.

The new model is collaboration, not competition.It’s all built on a good name.What’s the best name for your interactive venture? It’s the same element that’s key to any other direct marketing success: a call to action that tells the prospect what to do, where to get information, or how order. These two factors are your foundation on which to build your Branded Business. One other point that you absolutely get is that dotCOM, in itself alone, is the most widely advertised and accepted Brand in Online Marketing. Congratulations for being there first!

The other most important lesson since 1999 is that the platform is more important than eyeballs. Only three companies I know succeeded implementing every principal here and in the primer: Apple, .CO and ShopCity.com.

This quote from one of Madison Avenue's iconic branding experts, Bruce Turkel sums it up: "Of course 1999, as far as I am concerned, it was God's way of giving money directly from venture capitalists to advertising agencies. It was a great period of time for us and then the whole thing blew up. Then we figured out how to actually go from all the craziness and all the hype into real ways of generating revenue, of getting interest, and getting people to visit our clients and spend money with them. Because the whole eyeball thing is terrific, but you know what, if you're not getting the green tickets, the rest of it, as far as I'm concerned, is not real."